Tea Time at the High Line

New York City, Vape-Lips and the Language of God

Hi, and welcome. You can read this post for free, or listen to me read it by becoming a paid subscriber — a pretty-cheap way to support me as a writer. I appreciate you. ❤️

👆 The intro ends at about 5 minutes in, where the narration for this piece begins.

---

I flew to New York City on something like a whim because something like the Wind said, “Go.” On my second night there, Jayne asked me how woo-woo I am, and I said “A.F.” and so that’s the only explanation I’m offering.

I got sick the next night, which is the first time I’ve all-but uncontrollably cried at at a communion table since… well, I don’t know if that’s ever happened before, actually. Maybe. Anyway, she thought that my body was just shedding some pain, and I’m into that frame of reference.

I sat at Washington Square Park the following evening next to a guy who was really mad at another guy about not paying him enough for the nicotine vape he “just put his lips all over.” The guy with the lips offered to give the vape back and the mad guy screamed, “What am I going to do with a lipped vape, bro?”

Great question, really.

During Pastors, Priests and Guides, Lisha Epperson led us all through an imaginative body prayer. We spread out across the room and moved our way through a kind of yogic journey as different characters in the gospel-storm: Christ asleep in the hull. Waking up. Quieting the winds and the waves.

So it is from the quiet of my own deep center. And still… How long, O Lord, will you forget me forever?

[And how long, lil dude, will you neglect to remember?]

I woke up with pink eye in both eyes the next morning. Then I coughed for five weeks and thought my side was going to split and I’ve started to notice a bit of a pattern in my life that goes something like this:

Emotion is finally allowed to flow, and then goes the immune system.

Release.

The first time I hopped on the C Line from SoHo to hear Jonathan preach, I was cough-syrupped to high heaven, and boarded south on accident. When I finally snuck into The Chapel Of The Good Shepherd, I caught the back-most seat in time to hear about life breathed into valleys of dry bones, and the skeleton in my skin-suit needed to hear it.

When he finished, I took my third communion in one week (and in however-many-years) as offered by a hand excluding no one from the table, and thank God, because I — like everyone else who pays the pain that has not yet been transformed forward — am an excluder and need unbridled welcomes to soften me.

There are a thousand ideas to believe in. I think of all of them in the split-second I think of one. Call us the neural-network of the Divine coming on-line and thank God for these connection-points — every conflict that creates paradox and turns from scream to hum to Nothing.

The very first t-shirt design I ever created said — in big-block hardcore text — “Crooked Mouth, Quiet Down” next to a collage-style cutout of a T-Rex head.

If Silence is the language of God then I want to speak it.

---

Here are some photos from my trip.

---

Most of my interest, writing and creative expression exists as an attempt to discover “language in service of the unsayable.”

In other words: giving bodies to ghosts.

I’ve been finding sheets to throw over them for almost fifteen years now, and none of it would be possible without you.

Since folks often ask, below are five ways that you can help me continue to find language for a living.

1. Become a paid subscriber of A Becoming.

2. Buy my book, “It’s All Worth Living For.”

3. Become a founding member and get my book for free.

4. Check out the rest of my work, here.

5. Let me help you with / coach you through yours, here.

Know someone[s] who would appreciate this edition of A Becoming? Click this button.👇